Cabaret' celebrates 41st birthday with a party

This 1972 photo released by Warner Bros. Home Video shows Michael York as Brian Roberts, left, and Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in a scene from "Cabaret." The landmark film "Cabaret", starring Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Michael York, has turned 41. All three actors will be attending an anniversary celebration screening planned Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013, at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where the movie first premiered in 1972. (AP Photo/Warner Bros. Home Video)

The landmark film “Cabaret” — starring Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Michael York — has turned 41, but that’s not going to stop a party: All three actors will be attending an anniversary celebration screening planned Thursday at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where the movie premiered in 1972.

“I can’t wait to see them all again,” says Minnelli, 66, who won an Academy Award playing Sally Bowles, the fishnet-and-bowler hat wearing chanteuse. “Everybody who worked on it was just wonderful.”

The Bob Fosse-directed film, adapted and reworked from the Broadway musical, has also been painstakingly remastered — a facelift of sorts — by Warner Home Video and will be available on Blu-ray and DVD on Feb. 5.

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“Cabaret,” which won eight Academy Awards — in a year that also featured competition from a little film called “The Godfather” — hasn’t seemed to gather mold over time, remaining a crucial cultural touchstone.

Grey, who won an Oscar as the menacing, white-faced master of ceremony, recalls attending a screening of the new blockbuster “Les Miserables” and immediately being asked questions.

“Some of the people involved in the production were very, very anxious to get my response because of `Cabaret,”’ said Grey, 80. “It turned out to be the thing that you compare everything after that.”

The film opened Feb. 13, 1972, to strong reviews, with Roger Ebert calling it an “unforgettable cry of despair” and Variety saying it was “literate, bawdy, sophisticated, sensual, cynical, heart-warming, and disturbingly thought-provoking.”

The American Film Institute placed it fifth on its list of greatest movie musicals, and “Cabaret” was deemed significant enough to be earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress.

“Cabaret,” both the Broadway show and film, are based on the 1951 Broadway play “I Am a Camera,” which, in turn, was based on Christopher Isherwood’s book “Goodbye to Berlin.”

Set in 1931 Berlin, “Cabaret” centers on the world of the indulgent Kit Kat Klub as it becomes intertwined with the world outside, which gets more precarious on the brink of World War II.

John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the songs for the Broadway show, removed some for the film and added others, including “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time” and “Money, Money.” The soundtrack retains the classic “Willkommen” and “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

“Cabaret” hasn’t been shown in a decade because one of the film reels had a vertical scratch. Restorers recently went frame by frame through the entire film — all 1.4 million of them.

The work was so time-consuming that the 40th anniversary last year was missed. But fans will now get a high-def print six times as clear and sharp as the previous DVD release, as well as plenty of goodies, including new photos and a new documentary, “Cabaret: The Musical That Changed Musicals.”

Fosse got the job directing the film because Hal Prince, the stage director, was too busy. Fosse, raised in the theater, was a risk since his only other film, “Sweet Charity,” had bombed.

“He still managed to be phenomenal and make a groundbreaking, historic movie musical by rethinking it and changing musical movies forever,” said Grey, who reprised the role he played onstage. “It was oddly much darker on-screen than it was onstage.”

Dark is an understatement. Musical movies on the whole were saccharine in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Fosse’s film was a stab of something more realistic — all but one song was sung in the confines of the cabaret itself — and also more frightening.

The film dealt with Nazism, anti-Semitism and homosexuality. In one song, a German folk dance is juxtaposed with another scene of someone being beaten by Nazis. The movie also reinserted the often-omitted final line in “If You Could See Her,” a love song between the MC and a woman in a gorilla suit: “If you could see her through my eyes/She wouldn’t look Jewish at all!”

Filming took place in Munich in the spring with Minnelli as Sally, a role she had lost out on for Broadway because the part had been written originally for an Englishwoman. Minnelli created the look — bowl-cut hair and huge eyelashes that would become iconic.

York, Minnelli and Grey recall a tough working environment. The perfectionist Fosse, who died in 1987, made the actors do take after take after take. They recall enormous amounts of smoke and harsh lighting — but also the lifelong bonds that were created.

“It looks great and it was worth it,” said York, 70. “For me, it was one of the most enjoyable film shoots I ever experienced. I’m not just saying that because it’s the appropriate thing to say. But it really was.”

The three will be reunited at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where they sat 41 years ago and were stunned to hear people applauding after every song.